Video game companies have recently suffered massive layoffs, and the industry's largest convention was laid to rest last year. But the bustling of this summer's TooManyGames convention showed that the Philadelphia region is an unexpected site of passion and enthusiasm for playing and making games.TooManyGames goes back 20 years, and this year's show on June 28-30 at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks had a record-high attendance of over 23,000 people, according to organizers.

There are times when you hear a game premise that sounds so obvious that you’ll be wondering why you didn’t think of it yourself. Enter Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, a five-player asymmetrical multiplayer game that pits four Ghostbusters against one Ghost. According to studio IllFonic, best known for Friday the 13th: The Game and Predator: Hunting Grounds, the hope is that this next title will be a reflection on lessons learned from making those games.

Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics provided us with about an hour of footage showcasing the first two campaign missions of War for Wakanda. We also had the opportunity to speak to writer Hannah MacLeod and senior designer Scott Walters from Crystal Dynamics to learn more about their process and inspirations.

There’s murder afoot in Tangle Tower, the latest title from SFB Games. The British duo of brothers Tom and Adam Vian were on the PAX East 2020 show floor, demonstrating their murder mystery puzzle game to attendees on Nintendo Switch and iOS. The story has players revisit the eponymous character from an earlier SFB Games title, Detective Grimoire, but Switch owners are probably more familiar with a game that came in between these Grimoire games: Snipperclips.

The livelihood of many of the developers behind all of these games will be disrupted, which means that getting the word out for these independent titles is essential for them now more than ever. Events like PAX East may be on hold for now, but online and remotely, we can try our best to carry the spirit, excitement, and collaboration by raising each other’s voices.

DualShockers‘ Ryan Meitzler and I were on the floor to try out the offerings at PAX Unplugged, and while we didn’t get to touch on every game there, a number of titles left impressions on us. For myself, I focused on games from independent studios, and especially games that took advantage of the tactile nature of tabletop games and played with either the medium, with different genres, or with both. Scroll down to see some of my favorite original tabletop games from PAX Unplugged 2019.

It’s game day in Philly this weekend, but you can put down the sports gear and pick up the cards and dice. For the third year in a row, board game expo PAX Unplugged takes over the Pennsylvania Convention Center. PAX Unplugged is run by Penny Arcade, which also hosts a series of video-gaming expos called PAX. But its analog board-gaming offshoot has been growing in popularity, much like the games themselves.

It may be too easy to compare every four-player co-op game with zombies to Left 4 Dead, but it should be said that Project Resistance takes some interesting liberties with that formula. Through a playable demo at New York Comic-Con 2019, this multiplayer spin-off of the Resident Evil series showed off its stuff to a Western audience for the first time. What I tried out was fascinating in concept, but a bit mushy in practice. The Capcom folks at the booth, however, kept stressing that all of this was very much a work in progress—the game doesn’t even have a name yet.

Before the cast and crew of Marvel's Runaways showed off the season 3 premiere, all present on stage for the New York Comic-Con 2019 panel engaged in a wholesome exercise. Executive producer and Marvel Television president instructed each cast and crew to say something they love and appreciate about the person sitting to their left. From that, it was easy to see how strong their sibling-like relationships were three years into working on this show.

When my colleague Jesse Lab and I saw the DC Universe panel at last year's New York Comic-Con, we came out of the room incredulous and skeptical (and with over a free year of the service). It's been a full year since then, and at a press reception for DCU last Thursday night, the tone was different.

'I don't want to watch any of those movies,' said The King's Man director/co-writer Matthew Vaughn, ragging on traditional Oscar fare. Speaking at the 20th Century Fox panel at New York Comic-Con 2019, Vaughn name-dropped a number of films that inspired this World War I-era prequel to his Kingsman films: Doctor Zhivago, The French Connection, Lawrence of Arabia, and especially The Man Who Would Be King. From the looks of what was shown at the panel, The King's Man looks like it'll be Vaughn's take on the movie epic.

As a devotee of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I couldn’t help but feel massively underwhelmed by the E3 2019 presentation of Marvel’s Avengers. While it didn’t look particularly egregious, it had a look and feel that seemed too understated, and very much derivative of the 2012 film that popularized the superhero group to the mainstream. It likely didn’t help that all we’ve seen is that damn Golden Gate Bridge tutorial sequence for the past several months. Turns out, when you get off that freaking bridge, the pitch for Marvel’s Avengers becomes a bit more interesting.

By the time Marvel’s Avengers from Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics releases, the film Avengers: Endgame will be over a year old. That movie was a farewell to some of the characters made famous by the 2012 original film, with a sense of closure. But this upcoming and long-hyped video game is asking us to get excited for Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Natasha Romanoff yet again, leading me to believe that this new game was in need of new blood. Square Enix responded to that worry today at New York Comic-Con 2019, announcing that Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, would be the sixth playable character.

For those who think that the Olympic Games has a bit too much Mario in it, Sonic at the Olympic Games on mobile platforms should do them well. This week, Sega released a trailer for what they call the “official Tokyo 202o Olympic video game” during the Tokyo Game Show. Like its counterpart on the Nintendo Switch, which we played at E3 2019, this game will feature classic Sonic characters competing in a number of sporting events, but this particular event is getting special care, with the Games being in Sega’s home country this time around.

I wanted to dive into the heart of what made Flame Con a beacon for queer communities in the convention scene. Con organizers GeeksOUT put together an interview for me with Steve Gianaca, the Vice President of GeeksOUT and the Chair of Flame Con for a candid discussion on queer spaces in nerd fandoms.

Formerly known as Drawdog, Chicory: A Colorful Tale has been officially unveiled by Wandersong creator Greg Lobanov. It’s a wholesome story about a custodian dog who unexpectedly ends up wielding a magic paintbrush, and the upcoming video game comes from Lobanov, sound designer Em Halberstadt (Night in the Woods, Untitled Goose Game), and composer Lena Raine (Celeste, Guild Wars 2). Still in the midst of development, the game is now the subject of a Kickstarter campaign.

On the last weekend of July, I drove over to the heart of Harlem in New York City to attend the Game Developers of Color Expo. This was their fourth annual event, gathering independent developers from across the globe, as well as representatives from bigger sponsors like Nintendo and Microsoft, at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. With a meeting of the minds for people of diverse backgrounds, I was curious about what the tone of the event would be given the current political climate.

It may have been easy to overlook the announcement of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga when it was just a press release and a cinematic trailer, but at E3 2019 TT Games earned some buzz with a closed-doors hands-off demo. While the game is still a ways off, it had to be seen to be believed. It was a huge step for the series in terms of gameplay concepts and technology, but in retrospect, this seemed to be the natural evolution and trajectory for the long-running series.

We’ve seen a number of dystopian societies in video games—you didn’t even have to look beyond E3 2019 to get a glimpse of them. Still, something about Watch Dogs: Legion strikes more of a chord than many of the other fantastical games vying for our attention. In a time where political unrest permeates every aspect of our lives, whether we admit it or not, there is something intriguing about the pitch of a game set in a theoretical post-Brexit London.

IndieCade has been a part of E3 for over a decade, and since then has held a number of international events and festivals showcasing the latest and most innovative developments of not just games, but interactive mediums in general. This was the mission that Festival Director Sam Roberts described to me in detail, as I sat down with him on the E3 2019 show floor for an extended conversation.